Magnificence (22 page)

She heard someone call, then—it must be Portia. She propped the basement door open quickly with a bag of the silica so the light would fall into the hallway, then ran back along the hall.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. No 911 needed,” she called up from the bottom of the well. “It’s a basement. It’s just a basement. But there’s a lot of storage space and I want to check it out.”

“I’m curious,” came Portia’s voice. Flashlight beams shone into Susan’s face.

“Relax, get on with your evening,” said Susan. “I’ll give you a full report. Go inside and have dinner, don’t wait outside in the dark. Really—it’s just a basement. Concrete and brick and there are lights that work. The walls aren’t going to fall in on me.”

She waited till they took their flashlights and left, then went back down the hallway. In the morning, she was thinking, she’d bring Jim down and he could help her look for the connection between the basement and the main house—there must have once been a door, must have once been a passage between them. It made no sense, this isolation.

The metal cabinets were of all different widths, she saw, some tall and thin like lockers, others as wide as a walk-in closet, and all closed tightly, though she could see no locks. When she pulled at the handle on the first locker she felt another pull against her, as though the door was vacuum-sealed. But the handle moved down, there was a pop, and the door was open.

She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur—beautiful, striped—or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.

She pulled it out gently—it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a hook or something—and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe—a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters:
Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883
.
In wild, @ 1870s
.

She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point—she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something—possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.

She counted the doors, moving back through the room—dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.

She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors, two metal handles that met in the middle. She took one in each hand and wrenched them downward. It took a minute, but then the seal broke, they too came open and she stood back.

It was a wolf, already mounted. A gray wolf, it looked like to her. It stood with its front paws close together, its head raised, as if listening. The mouth was shut; it did not look fierce at all, merely attentive, even faithful.

She turned to look at the right-hand door, where another white sticker read
North America Mammals 1.1.7.01. Newfoundland wolf, Canis lupus beothucus. Canada native. Extermination. Wild specimen, @ 1911.
It was a kind of wolf she hadn’t heard of, she thought. But she couldn’t leave it here: she would have it moved upstairs. The next cabinet took her by surprise: a huge penguin-like bird, black on its back and white on its stomach, standing on a fake rock. It was almost three feet tall, and had big, webbed feet and atrophied-looking wings.
North America, Europe Birds. 1.2.1.02. Great auk, Pinguinus impennis. Iceland native. Collection. Zoo specimen, @ 1844
.

The great auks were extinct—had been for a long time. She had read about it in one of the old man’s natural history books, a thick one in the library with lithographs or pen-and-ink drawings, she didn’t know which. She’d trailed her fingers over them for their minute details and the fineness of the lines. She found it while she was looking up another bird, looking up
albatross
. She’d wanted to know what kind of scenery an albatross would need, to order a fix on an albatross mount, and then she came to
auk
and read the auks’ story and it was impossible to forget. Auks mated for life; they did not know how to fly and walked very slowly, so they were easily taken. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the last known pair in existence was found incubating a single egg on a rock in Iceland. Both the adults were quickly dispatched by strangling and their only egg was crushed beneath a boot.

The auks had been known to be on their way out, down to that one last, isolated colony, and collectors had wanted them for the skins.

Had the wolf and the quagga also vanished?

She crossed the room and opened another cabinet at random—a small, square one at eye level. She saw what looked like a mouse.
South America Mammals. 3.1.8.06. Darwin’s rice rat, Nesoryzomys darwini. Galápagos native. Competition by nonnatives. @ 1929
.

Beside it, in another square compartment, was a brown frog with yellow spots sitting on a large plastic leaf, which looked, like most of the amphibian mounts in the old man’s collection, as though it had been shellacked.
South America Amphibians. 3.3.7.14. Long-snouted jambato, Atelopus longirostris. Ecuador native. Uncertain; disease, weather warming. @ 1989
.

She turned and went to another wall, opened another small locker and this time found a bird:
Asia Birds. 5.2.2.08. Bonin Islands grosbeak, Chaunoproctus ferreorostris. Japan native. Habitat destruction by nonnatives. Zoo specimen, @ 1827
.

She stopped and looked around her—the many closed doors beneath the fluorescent tubes, the few she’d left standing open with their mounts visible within. The bags of silica gel must be to keep them from molding, though it wouldn’t work forever. Maybe they were already gathering mildew, breeding the larvae of beetles and moths beneath their wings or claws . . . they should be moved, she should move them as soon as she could. She wondered what T. would say, with his interest in rare animal species. All of these were extinct, obviously; the dates would have to be when they disappeared.

In a dark back alcove off the main room, past what looked like a disused furnace, she saw a big glass case. There were no fluorescents on that section of ceiling and it was too dim to see; but maybe the case had its own light. She walked over and looked around on the wall for a switch, but couldn’t find one and impatiently turned on her flashlight instead.

Inside the case there was no backdrop—no diorama at all, only a bare plywood floor and an oversized bird skeleton. It was brown and ancient, not the usual clean white of bones, and its bill had a bulbous, rounded end. From head to foot the skeleton was easily the size of the great auk and looked like a dinosaur to her, maybe a kind of bird dinosaur, but the sticker on the side read
Raphus cucullatus
.
Dodo.
Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715
.

That was all.

It had to be: the old man’s legacy.

•

Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen—Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.

“It’s just a regular basement with a lot of closet space,” she told them. “And more skins for taxidermy.”

“Good lord,” said Portia.

“Talk about overkill,” said the gray lady, in a small chirp of a voice.

“I think these might be valuable, though,” said Susan. “I think maybe a university or something might even want them. Maybe they could be donated.”

“Dear, aren’t you late for the meeting with your lawyer friend?” asked Angela—as though Jim didn’t, for all intents and purposes, live in the same house with them. With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again. She moved a cube of carrot around with her fork.

Susan had almost forgotten, she realized, after the basement. It was late but she could still go to meet him.

“Thanks for everything,” she told Portia, and took the back stairs up to her bedroom to change her clothes.

In fact she felt cut off and subdued. She couldn’t say anything to the old women, she was not qualified to tell them about the basement’s contents. She was marginal in all this and they were even further away from the matter: they had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing about it, disturb the truth with a false statement. She didn’t know what the legacy was, if it was important or run-of-the-mill, whether its specimens were real or reconstructed, contraband or legal. For all she knew they had been stolen in the first place. Best to move on, best to close off the subject of the mounts in the rooms beneath to casual discussion and quietly bring in her own natural history expert.

Best to leave out what purported to be the skeleton of a dodo.

10

W
hen they got back she’d had too much wine—Jim had driven them home—and she collapsed on the bed, useless for sex. He kneeled at the end of the bed and took off her shoes for her, slipped off her skirt and lay down beside her as she pulled the sheet over herself, groaning.

“Ice water?” she asked, pathetically. “Please?”

“Sure,” said Jim, and heaved himself off the bed again. “I’ll brave the geriatrics.”

“Aren’t they asleep?”

“Some of them are nocturnally active.”

He didn’t come back immediately and soon she felt too dizzy lying down. To make her head stop spinning she stood up and went to the bathroom sink, where she splashed water on her face. She found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed three tablets with tepid water drunk messily from the tap. She thought of the shaft walled in bricks, the shaft that struck right down into the ground, and now it seemed to be imbued with a mysterious and magnetic attraction . . . down into the earth, down below, into the caverns that for years had known no footfalls but her own. She thought of the stainless steel rungs of the ladder, which she had descended with care and with deliberation as though she were an explorer, a miner, a sailor on a submarine. When she descended the rungs of a ladder she had a direct, secret and linear purpose: she would open the doors. She would go down there now and open all the doors.

She expected to run into Jim on the way out of the house, take him with her down into the well. But she cruised through the empty, well-lit kitchen and did not see him, cruised out to the back, clutching her flashlight, stumbling awkwardly over pieces of ground in the dark. Still she often felt she was floating, elevated—no doubt due to the fact that she was so far from sober. Barefoot, she had to pick her way over the flagstones, not wanting to step into the cracks between them, not wanting to feel the hard nubbins of rock on the tender soles of her feet. She had never had the benefit of tough feet, never formed calluses on the balls of her feet or the back edges of the heels or the big toes.

“Never got the tough feet,” she said aloud, sloppy.

At the shaft she told herself to be extra careful, reminded herself she was loaded and this would be a perfect time to break her neck, crumpled and wasted at the bottom of a brick-lined well. She held the flashlight in her teeth—it barely fit, and biting down on it made her jaw ache—and descended with the unevenness of her own heavy breathing filling her ears. She almost lost her footing twice, her bare feet slick on the metal.

Then she was down, through the door, along the hall and into the locker room, where she turned on the light and staggered to the first bank of cabinets.

Open them, she thought, open, open, open.

The first was a gazelle, the second some kind of warthog, then a pygmy hippopotamus. In a bank of smaller boxes there was a bear’s head, a mouse, a bat labeled
FLYING FOX
. A kind of cat with huge ears—a serval subspecies, according to the sticker—and the head of something cow-like, almost like a longhorn but thinner, labeled
HARTEBEEST
. Then reptiles: a skink, a tortoise, a big boa. All the stickers had dates on them, all of the species had expired, some as far back as the early nineteenth century. A duck, an owl, a parakeet. Pigeon, starling, dove; coot, petrel, warbler.

Then she was past Africa and into Europe: a Caspian tiger, a Caucasian moose, an elk, an ibex, a lynx, a hare, a dormouse. Two lizards, a raven, a glass tray of insects labeled
PERRIN’S
CAVE BEETLE
and
TOBIAS
CADDISFLY
. Past Europe to Oceania: wallabies from Australia, rats, long-eared bats, one kangaroo. From New Zealand some birds—shorebirds with long, straw-thin legs, a bunch of tiny wrens, a tray of snails, a gecko. Then she was in Asia and the doors opened to a leopard, a pig, a Japanese sea lion, an ostrich. The sea lion she stopped and stared at—its brown hide faded to gold and then back, and its head, much like a seal’s, was graceful with huge black eyes and long black whiskers.

Her head was still spinning and she wished she’d brought more water. Water, water and more water—she needed it—but she couldn’t stand to retreat now. She had to open all the doors. North America next, where there were still a lot of closed cabinets—first the birds, far more of them than she’d known were lost, bright-colored tropicals, macaws and parrots and parakeets. Then reptiles, iguanas and salamanders, frogs and fish—chubs and trout and dace and shiners. The cabinets of small mammals—a shrew, a vole, a fox, a gopher, a pygmy rabbit, a skunk. Then she was throwing open the big doors to a bighorn sheep, a bison, a monk seal, a jaguar . . .

She was tired already, she realized. Too many doors. Closed and open. The old man had been far more methodical down here than he had been with the more pedestrian collection in the house above. She stood with her ears ringing, her bare feet cold against the cement floor, her eyes smarting, her thoughts muddled. She was looking back at the door she’d come in through, all the way open against the wall, and saw something protruding from behind it on the wall—a picture frame, it looked like. She crossed the room and closed the door.

It was a framed map of the basement, a floor plan with each bank of cabinets labeled by continent and taxon.
South America Mammals
or
Asia Reptiles
, for all of the continents.
At the top of the plan were the black words, in old-fashioned type,
GLOBAL HOLOCENE EXTINCTIONS. @ 1800–2000
. At the bottom,
THE LEGACY COLLECTION
.
A PROJECT OF HUNTERS CLUB INTERNATIONAL.
But it wasn’t 2000 yet, she thought ploddingly. He had been looking forward to his completion date, but then had died before he could finish.

Upstairs was also a map somewhat like this; she had tried in vain to impose a neat order on the collection . . . the story of the auks, she thought. Of how the skins were acquired . . . the question of whether they were murdered for the sake of their own history, murdered in order to become mementos of themselves.

Why did he have to be dead? The old man was dead just like his specimens, but not as nicely preserved and she could ask him nothing. Still she wanted to know about all of this. She wanted to know where he had gotten his bestiary. She leaned in and looked at the map again: there was a piece she thought she had missed, a large square on the corner of the footprint. It appeared to be a room she hadn’t noticed, a room that maybe wasn’t here. There was no label on it. The square was blank, with only a notch in one side for a door. She turned around, orienting herself. It should be past the dodo case, she thought, the door to the room, and checked the floor plan again to make sure. If it was here at all.

She walked back, past the glass, past the yellow-brown rib cage of the bird. What if that skeleton was fake, she thought—a movie prop from a back lot somewhere or an ostrich or something—and all of this some kind of hoax? Possible. The old man was so inscrutable. In the semidarkness she could see planks propped up against the wall, two-by-fours. She reached up and moved them aside. And there it was: a thin white door in the sheetrock, unfinished. Not even a knob yet, only a hole cut near the edge, where a future knob was meant to go . . . she hooked two fingers into the hole and pulled, and the door wobbled and came off entirely. It wasn’t on hinges, even, just sitting there. She set it aside.

Black then, in front of her: a whole separate room. She took a step and fumbled inside to the left, then the right for a switch, and finally she found one. More clicking fluorescents, and she was in. She thought it was empty at first, until she noticed the walls were divided into squares—cabinets, all of them. Drawers. Square white drawers from the floors to the ceilings, like a morgue in a crime procedural, except there was no refrigeration. She assumed the drawers in morgues were refrigerated. Weren’t they? Toe tags, people’s lips blue? She’d never been to a morgue.

The drawers in this room, like the metal cabinets in the other, were unmarked on the outside. She approached the first one on her right, at eye level, with hesitation. It took her a minute, and then she pulled it open.

Bones, old-looking—maybe a chimpanzee or gorilla, something large and anthropoid, not all connected and not complete, but neatly arranged where they should be. There was only half of one leg, and the skull was far back in the drawer. She could make out a jawbone.

She didn’t want to look closely at the skull. The skull was excessive. But then—the sockets of her eyes shot with pain suddenly, her headache returning to prominence—despite herself she opened the drawer beneath: another set of similar bones.

But these had scraps of clothing on them. She saw the foot bones and the shins.

And the drawer above. Filthy, stained-looking and ancient brown bandages: the remnants of some kind of mummification process. She’d seen one long ago on exhibit, though mostly she remembered the pharaoh’s gold coffin with his headpiece of blue stripes. But this was no monarch. More reminiscent of those glassed-in scenes of Indians, old-fashioned displays from before the days of political correctness—the colonial superiority, the cruelty of patronage. Women in beaded headbands sitting and grinding corn on concave stones near a campfire, or women weaving with their papooses on their backs, a scene from a made-up history.

She looked for a label now, found she was looking, inevitably. And it was there, on the inside of the drawer’s front panel, hard to make out at first.

Haush tribeswoman. Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Extermination, measles, smallpox
.
@ 1925
.

The label in the middle drawer, which held a smaller skeleton, read
Chono youth, T del F, Argentina. Early 20th c.
The bottom drawer, with a label printed on a dot-matrix printer, as though it was more recent:
Yaghan man, “
Domingo,” T del F, Argentina. Measles, other diseases, prob. introduced by missionaries. @ 1960
.

The headache came in waves—maybe the aspirin would dull it once it was all the way into her system. She sank down to the floor, her back against the closed drawers. Her knees were raised in front of her and she studied them. If she dropped her knees to the cold floor and her legs stuck out straight she would be a parallel set of bones . . . it made no sense, she thought: he had his club, they had their animal trophies; his club hadn’t hunted these dead people, the members of vanished tribes. It was as though the old man had changed his angle at the end of his life, suddenly. Almost—though she would never know, she thought, self-pitying—as though he had veered from his hunting trajectory, from his celebration of killing, into this plain and sad little corner. An unfinished room of people’s bones.

The room had a melancholy spareness, the end of a long fight, a battlefield desolate with the flattened—the now so modest!—remains of the dead. Above the dry winter grasses rose the pennants of friends and enemies alike, shredded and flapping in the wind.

•

Someone was saying her name; she must have nodded off. A ghost of the old man, maybe, or one of the victims in those far-off tribes, killed with measles, killed by the passion of the emissaries of Christ.

But no: it was only Jim. He was calling down from a hole in the roof of the earth. The hole in the world. He called down to her from the sky.

She got up slowly, not without some twinges of joint ache, and went through the animal room again, aware of the spectacle of their dead beauty on both sides of her as she walked, dreamily. She followed his voice toward the brick well, surrounded by the derelict loveliness. Then the half-light of the open door was behind her. She blinked and fumbled with her flashlight.

“Susan,” he was saying, insistently. “Are you down there?”

She found the switch, felt the plastic ridges under her thumb and pushed it, raising the light shakily until it captured his legs—his legs at the edge of the opening. The bottom of his shirt. He wasn’t bending down, rather he was standing. He wore pants.

Of course he wore pants. A man often did.

She liked, come to think of it, the idea of men who didn’t wear pants—Scotland men. Scottishers, Scotch. Was that what they called them? Scots, that was it. Also men in parts of Asia, including monks, possibly. And certain Arabs. They wore djellabas, for instance. Bless them, bless them, bless all those skirt-wearing men. Truthfully, the skirts looked good on them. There was nothing feminine about a skirt. Not necessarily. If more of the men, over the course of history, had worn skirts . . . but she, of course, had never been on the battlefield. She and the others of her kind were always far away—the tragedy elapsed and people like her, for much of history, remained on the sidelines. Men slew each other, they slew the animals, went slaying and slaying. Women were mostly witnesses. They were not innocent—it wasn’t that simple, not by a long shot—more like accessories to the crime, if not the principal offenders. They saw killing ravage all things beneath the sun and were the silent partner in it. You didn’t want to kill, you had no interest in killing—your very genes went against it. Possibly your hormones. Again, the molecules that governed you. But you were also far too weak to stop it. Your weakness was your crime.

Not weaker than the men, per se, just differently weak. The wanting to be liked, avoidance of conflict . . . you were profoundly and eternally guilty of this terrible weakness, this moral as well as physical weakness, the fear of being hurt, of being injured, of being embarrassed. You were crippled by the guilt of being who you were. Guilty of being yourself.

The self-help books urged you to be yourself, and yet, as it turned out, being yourself was the crime to end all crimes.

“Susan! You down there drunk? All by yourself?”

Drunk yes, but not alone.

She turned and looked back to the rectangle of light, past which the corpses lay in state. If there were ghosts here they were the ghosts of men, not of the animals, men hovering over the artifacts of their prey. They had no interest in her, none at all. Rather it was for her to be interested in them. The ghosts of men, in this case the ghosts of killers, because that was part of the atmosphere of institutions . . . a museum held, in its perfect, orderly, austere glass cases, not only the presence of the artifacts but the invisible presence of those who had hunted them, those who had dug them up or even stolen them. The unknown or the dead people—no, their desire, that was the presence that hovered there, their deep wanting, part of the sacred air.